"Such was the import of a note that I recently found in a library copy of Mallarmé’s selected letters: “Please pray that God would give me the patience and perseverance to get through this next week.”" Alex Ross • New Yorker

"Those who expect poetry to be laid out in a traditional manner and with rhymes may be disappointed. I, too, love such poetry when it is done well. But please do not be put off." Nick Lezard • Guardian

"The presence of rhyme in ‘France Now’ is fooling and foolish. Making a neat couplet like, “It’s absurd in France to be a Jew / Because someone will want to murder you”, is galling in its trite, satisfying way, but it keeps the fact of the poem as something written and constructed as part of the poem. This is important – for Seidel, poetry is awkward and persistent but it does not make bad things good (even if it makes them rhyme)." Edwina Attlee The Poetry Review

"Maybe it was fine to try and write a sort of mesh of poems, to allow connections of seemingly disparate things, if it felt correct or if they leapt out. I think in the past I’d tried to keep my poems quite isolated from one another, seeing overlap as a weakness or laziness of sorts, or betraying a lack of imagination." Rebecca Perry The Poetry Review

"It is not Turkish Dada, in fact it hardly resembles Dada at all; there is no sense of being released into free play. It is 300 pages of writings concerning “things”, taking various strategies, some bizarre, to locate something like the meaning or essence, or perhaps thingness, of things. Whether it does locate anything like this, or even wants to, is an open question. The “things” are not necessarily objects; in fact any noun seems to qualify: water, stones, golden oriole, roundness, slug, bra, sentences, book, numbers, house… It is perhaps justified to call the pieces “meditations” on these things." Peter Riley Fortnightly Review

"So, as I sat before Galway Kinnell, Ruth Stone, Maxine Kumin, Robert Bly, Gerald Stern, Philip Levine, Jack Gilbert, Lucille Clifton, and Donald Hall on the figurative dirt floors of their respective book-filled huts during the interviews I conducted with them between 2008 and 2011, I learned like a fool that the truths they imparted were unteachable, despite their memorable "music," residing solely within them as unique, original expressions that they had forged in the darkness of their "deep wells." Their wisdom made memorable sense, but it wasn't mine, and yes I was often initially shocked by their answers." Chard deNiord Cortland Review

"It is from this camouflage that the superegoic injunction “learn and enjoy”—as Ian Parker has phrased it in his Psychoanalytic Mythologies—is revealed. Thus it is that we must take the author’s advice, as he discusses production—on which he is an emerging theoretical voice to watch (or rather listen) out for—of capitalist subjectivity through enjoyment, and be wary of enjoyocentrism: “the text ought always to be [read] against the grain of its enjoyment, our own enjoyment often showing not our resistance to the structures of our capitalist society but our complicity within it. The enjoyment therefore is productive of capitalist subjectivity.”" Daniel Bristow on Alfie Bown The Critical Flame

"Working this way allows the critic to “think less about completed products and more about text in process; less about individual authorship and more about collaboration; less about originality and more about remix….” One such tool may be Text Mechanic, a text manipulator. This simple website can sort lists alphabetically or by line length (in either ascending or descending order); it can reverse the order of the lines or shuffle them; it can add or remove line breaks." Ty Clever The Critical Flame

"This appeal to reality, traces of whose original perfection persist on earth and which it is the poet’s task to collect and reassemble, haunts Bonnefoy’s poetry and his attempt to recreate “le vrai lieu” – the real world – uncontaminated by any kind of intellectual interference." Andrew McCulloch TLS

"As for T. S. Eliot, Griffith’s assertion that Eliot had ‘no especial interest in science and possibly even a slight disdain for it’ deserves much closer attention. For example, on 31 December 1922, the month in which The Waste Land was published in book form (having previously appeared in October’s first edition of The Criterion) T. S. Eliot wrote to his brother that he regretted ‘innumerable gaps’ in his knowledge and that there was ‘so much that I should like to know in the various sciences’ – hardly disdainful.6 In November and early December, in letters to Pound, Eliot had already spoken of wanting The Criterion (his response to The Athenaeum’s decline following its amalgamation with The Nation in 1921) to be a review ‘as unliterary as possible’." Duncan MacKay PN Review

"I had judged the Foyle and run the course back in 2006, and seven years on, the Foyle young poets group I had taught were scything through Oxbridge, publishing poetry pamphlets with Faber, writing for the national press, and all the time networking frantically. By mixing together this group of exceptionally talented youngsters – many of them privileged but a few definitely not – that course had forcefully changed most of their lives. I wanted some of that for our students: not just the poetry, but the sense of entitlement, and, yes, the networking too." Kate Clanchy Guardian

"Groarke’s poetry has always been a singularly gorgeous one, and this volume follows the arc of that highly sensuous, highly attuned voice through its various incarnations." Caitriona O'Reilly Irish Times

"He himself believed that his scientific studies would eventually be seen as more significant than his literary output. Today, most would agree that the essence of his work will be found in his poetry and plays, but the search for the centre is complicated by seismic shifts in style and attitude." Osman Durrani TLS

"Although reading private letters and journals should feel like snooping, something about the immediacy of Byron’s prose makes it seem, as in his poetry, that he is sharing an intimate secret or amusing anecdote intended just for us. After his wedding, he wrote to his new aunt Lady Melbourne to say it went well apart from the uncomfortable cushions in the church, “which were stuffed with Peach-stones I believe – and made me make a face that passed for Piety”." Colin Throsby TLS

"The rebellious, innovative [Rita Ann] Higgins is one of his distinctive heirs. Like Joyce, she knows just how to beat up the English language and her use of mythology, Irish language and Ireland’s past put her own inimitable stamp on her bang up-to-date present." Martina Evans Irish Times

"So there is quite a lot of Bunting’s writing which will strike that contemporary ear as resolutely minor. But what Bunting does with this ‘sharp study and long toil’ of prosody is to produce the marvellous long poems, or, as Bunting calls them, ‘sonatas’, of which the most famous is ‘Briggflatts’." Ian Pople Manchester Review

"He’s a man who thinks it clever to rhyme “stool cards,” “prison guards,” “stool bards,” “drool hards,” and “school yards.” Byron wept! Yet if you don’t read him, for the rude fancy as well as the occasional flights of terror, you’ll have missed something crudely eccentric—no, carnivalesque—in contemporary poetry." William Logan • New Criterion

"The meanings of his poems are not easily accessible but increasingly in latter years they have harked back to his childhood and to Bromsgrove." Gema Bate • Bromsgrove Advertiser

"I slowly realised as we travelled farther and farther from Oxford and nearer and nearer our destination that we were on a nostalgia journey, into the realms of Goldengrove, into Offa’s territory, and the nearer it we got so he became more and more animated." Andrew McNeillie • Clutag

"One of the fascinating aspects of this anthology is to note the cross currents and influences that have shaped the poetry included in it and to see how a legitimate desire to preserve one’s roots does not necessarily cut one off from the wider world." David Cooke • Manchester Review

"Sir Geoffrey Hill, one of England’s few indisputably major post-war poets, has died. Hill was a longstanding TLS contributor, publishing poems and review-essays with us, most recently this Easter, with his piece on Charles Williams." Robert Potts • TLS

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The Page is edited by John McAuliffe, Vincenz Serrano and, since September 2013, Evan Jones at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. It was founded in October 2004 by Andrew Johnston, who edited it until October 2009.